Colleges across the country compete to see who can reduce, reuse, and recycle the most waste.

As part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 Game Day Challenge, any college or university in the U.S. with a football team (which excludes my alma mater which dropped its football program at the height of the depression in 1932) can take their competition off the gridiron and into the stands by competing to see which school can recycle, reduce waste and cut greenhouse gas emissions the most.

The challenge is for schools to design a waste reduction plan for one home football game in October and measure the results. Schools can collect common materials for recycling including paper, beverage containers, cardboard, and food to be donated and composted. The amount of waste generated and recycled will determine which school is the greenest.

Schools can win in several categories including the least amount of waste generated per attendee; greatest greenhouse gas reductions; highest recycling rate; highest organics reduction rate (i.e., food donation and composting), and; highest combined recycling and composting rate.

While I think EPA’s challenge programs like these are a great place to start, why not step up the program and evaluate the categories over the course of a season? Reducing waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing recycling and composting for one game per season doesn’t really gauge the staying-power or long term viability of such programs.

Registration for the competition is now open. To enroll in the Challenge, schools must complete and submit the Registration Form by September 30, 2010.

The winning colleges will be announced in November and, like last year, will be publicized on EPA’s website.

Article by Timothy B. Hurst, appearing courtesy Ecopolitology.

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We’ve all heard the “recycle, reduce, reuse” mantra.  However, to really combat the current problem of overconsumption and reduce unnecessary waste, this saying should be flipped on its head: “reduce, reuse, recycle.”  Recycling is reactive, and society needs to combine it with a proactive solution, because recycling alone will not “fix” our current consumption problem.  The first step should be reducing initial resource use, which has skyrocketed in recent years.

According to the Sierra Club (via CNN), between the 1950s and the 1990s, the worldwide use of plastic quintupled, and developed countries such as America are leading the way in that consumption.  As an example of this trend, the same article reported that in 2007 one American consumed as many resources as 35 Indians.

Environmental activists are calling attention to these gross numbers in a variety of ways. One interesting example is the voyage of the Plastiki, a 60-foot boat constructed from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and powered by solar panels and windmills.  On March 20, the six man (technically five man, one woman) crew of the Plastiki set sail from San Francisco Bay, heading toward Sydney, Australia – 11,000 miles away.  As of June 11^th, 2010, the Plastiki’s crew was preparing to embark on the last leg of their journey, from the island of Samoa to Sydney, where they are expected to land in early July.  At that point, the small ship had traversed more than 5,500 nautical miles of Pacific Ocean.

The Plastiki’s philosophy, as stated on the project website, revolves around the idea that waste is a fundamental design flaw (in that it does not occur in nature) and that we need to rethink the concept of waste to use it as a resource.  It is also about undertaking what the team dubs a “Planet 2.0 way of thinking and acting.”  The voyage is meant to draw attention to current environmental issues, such as bottled water and plastic waste.  The idea was first conceived approximately four years ago by banking heir David de Rothschild following a UNEP report, “Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Deep Waters and High Seas,” that outlined the serious threat that pollution – especially plastics – poses for our planet’s oceans.

According to the project’s website, plastic makes up between 40 and 60 percent of the world’s marine waste and contributes largely to such environmental atrocities as the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch – a collection of North American and Asian garbage that is trapped in the upper water columns of the Pacific and is estimated to be approximately twice the size of Texas.  De Rothschild, the expedition’s leader, shared this account from the journey on the project’s website:

“When we look underneath the boat, the hull is covered in a fine, extra layer of plastic and as you run your hand across your face you see countless molecular size plastic fragments, known as mermaid’s tears. It is tragic. From above, the oceans still looks beautiful and untouched but just below the surface is this toxic stew that could quickly end up on our dinner plates. The issue is far more ominous than people imagine, as these commonly known ‘garbage patches’ are not just floating islands of trash but a swirling poisonous soup. The problem is subsurface – tiny pieces of material in the process of breaking down and floating in the top layer of the ocean where most species live, feed and breed.”

Hopefully extreme examples such as this will make us think a bit more about our actions and how they impact the environment.  Do you need that plastic water bottle?  Can you use a reusable coffee cup instead of a new plastic one every day?  Is bringing food to work in reusable Tupperware really more difficult than disposable plastic bags?  If you give it a little thought you will see that there are easy things that everyone can do to reduce resource use.  All it takes is a small attitude adjustment and a little bit of effort.

Article by Lillian Dunlap appearing courtesy CleanEnergy Project

photo: US Embassy New Zealand

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(Reuters) – Taiwan aims to transform several of its outlying islands into models of green energy production as part of a 10-year effort to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions, the government said on Monday.

Industrialized Taiwan, a major semiconductor, chemicals and steelmaker, will invest heavily in wind power on the Penghu islands in the Taiwan Strait. The aim is to raise renewable energy production to half total consumption of the 90,000 population, officials said.

On the Kinmen islets, also known as Quemoy, T$3 billion ($90 million) will be spent to develop solar power, recycle water and push eco-friendly architecture for the 70,000 people who live there, the Environmental Protection Administration said.

The agency said it was hoped the investments could deliver a rapid transformation of the energy supply on the islands and help drive efforts on the more industrialized main island, with a population of 23 million.

Taiwan said in March it would cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from all sources by 2020 to 2005 levels of about 257 million metric tonnes, or at least 30 percent below projected levels if no action were taken.

It has also laid out plans for 50 low-carbon villages on the main island.

Visible results on the outlying islands could help Taiwan’s bid for a U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change role that has been repeatedly blocked by its political rival China.

“The government needs to show it’s doing something, and these are the easiest places to show results,” said Robin Winkler, a lawyer and environmental activist in Taipei.

Reporting by Ralph Jennings, Editing by David Fogarty; article appearing courtesy Reuters.

photo: Francisco Diez

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I wasn’t thinking about my plastic diet, when I walked into the store and bought a chocolate bar yesterday. Obviously eating chocolate is not the healthiest thing to do for your body, but today I learned that the packaging material of chocolate bars is also not the best for the environment. It’s tricky because it is difficult to determine what materials were used in the production of the chocolate and candy wrappers.

Similar to milk and juice cartons or potato chip bags, the candy wrappers are generally laminated foils which are prepared by coating a paper base with wax, bonding a thin metal foil layer with an adhesive and dampening with a plastic solution. Because it is a mixed material, it is almost impossible to sort and recycle for producing other products.

The governments and waste management centers don’t recycle candy wrappers due to small scale volume and increased effort in the recycling process. Some enthusiastic handcrafters, such as TerraCycle, recycle the used foils and wrappers into handbags, purses and other accessories. The company found an innovative way to collect those waste items directly from the consumers. They create brigades who collect and send those materials to the company in exchange for nominal payment for each item received.

I am not sure whether I can be a successful brigade member. Therefore, I will simply cut my chocolate-bar consumption in the following weeks to keep away from the plastic-aluminum waste. But here is a question, why don’t packaging companies produce sustainable and environmentally friendly candy wrappers?

It’s hard to tell what portion of candy wrappers are recycled globally by handcrafters or companies. Though, the video below makes a nice comparison between the recycled and non recycled plastic bottles’ rate of consumption in the US.

photo: anyjazz65

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Do you remember CRTs (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs? Nowadays every thing seems to be Plasma or LCD. Where do the old CRT’s go?

A new MIT study reports that demand for these CRT devices is still greater than the supply of old discarded CRTs, whose glass is recycled to make new ones. The demand comes mostly from the world’s developing nations, where inexpensive TV sets using CRTs are one of the first luxury items people tend to buy as soon as they have a little bit of disposable income.

Sales of CRT television sets peaked in 2005 at about 130 million units worldwide, and declined to about 90 million last year, The bulk of these new sales are in Asia and Latin America. Virtually all CRTs are now manufactured in Asia.

CRT computer monitors peaked around 2000 at about 90 million units, but they have been replaced with other types almost completely.

CRTs and similar electronic devices are often collected at the curb or special collection drives. Where they go or how they are used is not certain at times.

Because the glass used in CRTs contains a substantial amount of lead which is used to block X-rays produced by the tube’s cathode ray gun to keep them from posing a health risk to viewers, the old tubes can potentially pose risks to human health if simply placed in landfills.

In some places, including most European nations and Japan, they are included in a category of electronics waste that must be properly recycled, but recycling requirements in the United States and most of the rest of the world are inconsistent, or even nonexistent. Where such rules are more likely to be enforced are at business sites as opposed to the residential user.

As a result, the study found that in terms of recycling glass from old CRTs to make new ones, “the amount of new glass required is decreasing, but is much greater than the amount of secondary glass collected, which is increasing.” That balance, the authors found, “is sustainable for the foreseeable future.”

In other words, manufacturers wanting to use the recycled glass can count on having a supply, and recyclers can count on finding a market for the old tubes, for many years to come.

The study was partly an attempt to develop a more general method for analyzing the flow of materials through the whole chain of production, use and disposal or recycling. This is a sort of life cycle analysis.

The biggest issue in recycling CRTs is the imbalance in the centers of supply and demand. Most of the old CRTs being disposed of are in the United States and Europe, whereas the greatest demand for the material for making new CRTs is in Asia. But because glass is a low value commodity, it is expensive to move it large distances.

Fortunately, there are other uses for recycled glass such as smelters and glass manufacturers (assuming they can tolerate the lead). If the plant is producing lead, the lead laced glass can actually add to the lead produced, although the amount is very small.

In Europe, with its strict regulations requiring electronics waste recycling, CRTs represent by far the biggest category of such material being collected, though e-waste is only 1 to 2 percent of the overall waste stream. Because of its lead content, it is one that merits attention. Much of it is shipped from Europe or the US to developing countries where there are fewer regulations regarding its disposal and the protection of people exposed to it. The potential for hazardous exposure is higher as a result.

Ruediger Kuehr, head of the operational unit at the United Nations University’s Institute for Sustainability and Peace, says that this academic study could provide important advice for both industry and government regulators because “those entities are often focused on short term and short sighted issues, and do not have the luxury of taking a broad systems wide, hence holistic, view of an issue.” He says this study is “quite useful in considering what should be done with all of the materials that are a byproduct from recycling, particularly when it is not clear there is demand for the recycled materials.”

There is a need for full life cycle analyses of products in order to plan for recycling and reuse. The current study shows how useful it can be in developing reuse markets.

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy of ENN

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U.S. researchers have demonstrated a technology that uses the sun’s heat to convert carbon dioxide and water into the building blocks of traditional fuels, a reverse combustion process that may emerge as a practical alternative to sequestration of CO2 emissions from power plants.

The prototype “Sunshine to Petrol” system, developed by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, uses concentrated solar energy to trigger a thermo-chemical reaction in an iron-rich composite located inside a two-sided cylindrical chamber.

The iron oxide is designed to lose an oxygen molecule when exposed to 1,500 degree C heat, and then retrieve an oxygen molecule when it is cooled down, essentially converting an incoming supply of CO2 into an outgoing stream of carbon monoxide.

Additionally, when researchers pump water into the chamber rather than CO2, the machine produces hydrogen. Combining those retrieved gases — hydrogen and carbon monoxide — they are able to create syngas, which can be used as a fuel.

While researchers say the technology likely will not be ready for market for 15 to 20 years, it could one day become a practical way to recycle CO2.

“It’s a productive utilization of CO2 that you might capture from a coal plant, a brewery, and similar concentrated sources,” said James Miller, a Sandia chemical engineer.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

[photo credit: Sandia National Labs]

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